Tuesday, October 02, 2007 Arinday: Oktoberfest and MassKara By G.H. Arinday, Jr. Sunfare
TWO DISTANT lands, two different cultures, both caressed by the chilly fingers of the month, have discovered in each other the common strands of ethnic and cultural feasts in the limpidity of uninhibited happiness uncorking the bottled waters of phantasm of either sorrows or other dreams.
Bavaria, a former highland and once a kingdom until 1918 and famous for its beer brewing industries, is several thousands of miles away from Bacolod, once a hilly place overlooking the warm sea, the transit point of shipping its sweet product to the neighboring island where the forebears of the leading families known as the sugar barons came from what is known today as Iloilo.
But Bacolod through the industry of its people and the people of the whole province of Occidental Negros became the country’s principal sugar capital, hence the name Sugarlandia.
Bavaria, being the source of the finest beer in the world, has given honor to its thriving industry and created the world famous beer feast known as Oktoberfest.
On the other hand, Bacolod, out of the chaos of the un-lamentable New Society under the said Orwellian regime, created MassKara to simulate joy and pour our their bruised feelings of losing most of their civil liberties, like a surrealistic and magical creativeness gave birth to such unprecedented feast that in its deepest sense a metaphysical form of protest.
But now, it is a culture by itself drawing away from the brief madness of the time under the Marcosian doctrine of “smiling” New Society.
The smiles in varied hues worn by the participants or the revelers have been becoming genuine and deeply-seated in the tradition which coincidentally takes place with the humming of the sugar mills after the season of death when the farm workers were idled and scrimped for their daily needs.
With the coolness of the weather, sometimes disrupted by the jealous rain just like the heavy snowfalls in Bavaria (A German province bounded by Italy and Austria in the south and southeast respectively), the MassKara festival by natural evolution attaining perfection has resembled in many ways the Bavarian Oktoberfest, when beer drinking becomes one of the main features from whence a peculiar form of happiness exudes a singular feeling where the hours are slow, the laughter profoundly expressing like an “Invitation to the Waltz.”
MassKara is really filled with positive joy, an unexplainable exhilaration to celebrate life and where dancers interpret in myriad ways the meaning of existence like the scents of sampaguita cavorting with the delectable aroma of grilled or broiled delicacies.
While the loud music competes with the thoughts of what tomorrow shall bring as you pour the wine or beer, the realization of what you are celebrating is the hourless moment in “the innermost” chamber of your heart is the “truest hymn” that life must go on, bidding farewell for a brief period to solitude and the sad madrigals of Life itself. On the higher plain of your dreamy state while the soul of the wine or beer titillate your thoughts you wish the brewed ambrosia to help you understand the significance of the event and the poetic symbols of varied smiles masking the actual faces behind.
Perhaps, to some possessed of poetic imagery, it would not be difficult to construct the significance that once in one’s existence, there is always a vast reservoir of pleasantness and the problem is where to find the right pathways.
Oktoberfest and MassKara are empirical symbols with deeper meanings other than being beer or wine guzzling.
The socio-cultural underpinnings have its own secrets to be discovered in relation to the needs of community festivities like the annual Oktoberfest and MassKara.
But as the winds of October would make its whiplash and the snowfalls, let it be considered that those seasons do not “cover the hopes of spring”---as the song goes.
In merriment, the ultimate aim is to express our gratefulness to the Omniscient One that we should not be immersed always in the hourglass of pain. A smile we deserve from everyone.
